Fifty-seven shloks of Guru Tegh Bahadur Ji stand at the end of the Guru Granth Sahib Ji, after the Mundavani, in a place of their own.
They are short, direct and bleak. Their subject is the shortness of life, the unreliability of everything a person relies on, and the futility of the attachments that structure a life.
They are recited at funerals and at times of loss, and they are the passages most Punjabi Sikhs can quote when something has gone wrong.
The last of them, according to tradition composed in prison at Delhi shortly before his execution, says that everything is a dream and nothing seen will endure.
A man wrote these knowing he was going to be beheaded for defending the religion of people who were not his, and they contain no self-pity and no reference to the circumstance.
They stand at the end of the volume, in the closing section of shloks. The placement is deliberate and it is the last thing a reader of the whole book reaches.
The language is plain to the point of bareness. There is almost no imagery in them, which is unusual for the volume and is part of why they are memorised so easily.
They are read through in the sehaj path and the akhand path and are among the passages most Punjabi households can recite without a book in front of them.